Has there been any useful usecase for NPUs in consumer…
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Has there been any useful usecase for NPUs in consumer hardware?
Every company seems to be adding NPUs to their latest hardware releases these days. The thing is, from my own experience, I still haven't come across any genuinely useful application for an NPU, or even much of an application at all.
By "useful," I mean mainstream features that an average user would actually use without needing technical knowledge or setting up local AI workflows. Most AI-powered tools I encounter still send requests to remote servers for inference. As far as I understand it, models that can realistically run locally on current NPUs are generally too small to deliver the kind of capabilities people associate with modern AI.
So I'm wondering:
* Are there any consumer-facing NPU use cases that people genuinely find valuable today?
* Is the industry just in a phase where every product needs an "AI" bullet point on the spec sheet?
* Or is this simply first-generation hardware/software, and we're waiting for the ecosystem to catch up?
It reminds me a bit of integrated GPUs. Years ago, iGPUs were terrible and mostly used just as a video output, but now they are very capable. Do NPUs seem likely to follow the same trajectory, or do you think local AI acceleration will remain a niche feature while most meaningful AI workloads continue to run in the cloud?
It looks like the mobile world is doing it better I guess? Lots of AI features are available (just my own experience owning a Samsung phone), but I am not sure if those feature are done locally or also rely on external server.
For example, recently I see in MS Teams a feature to upscale incoming video when the connection is bad, however that does nothing for me; or they also have the AI voice isolation which works decently. What I mean is stuff like that (when it works), like integration into video player to automatically upscale older footage, or the thing MS tried to do with Copilot (Recall or so?, of course disregard all the privacy concern, cool idea IMO)
#technology #hardware
source
Every company seems to be adding NPUs to their latest hardware releases these days. The thing is, from my own experience, I still haven't come across any genuinely useful application for an NPU, or even much of an application at all.
By "useful," I mean mainstream features that an average user would actually use without needing technical knowledge or setting up local AI workflows. Most AI-powered tools I encounter still send requests to remote servers for inference. As far as I understand it, models that can realistically run locally on current NPUs are generally too small to deliver the kind of capabilities people associate with modern AI.
So I'm wondering:
* Are there any consumer-facing NPU use cases that people genuinely find valuable today?
* Is the industry just in a phase where every product needs an "AI" bullet point on the spec sheet?
* Or is this simply first-generation hardware/software, and we're waiting for the ecosystem to catch up?
It reminds me a bit of integrated GPUs. Years ago, iGPUs were terrible and mostly used just as a video output, but now they are very capable. Do NPUs seem likely to follow the same trajectory, or do you think local AI acceleration will remain a niche feature while most meaningful AI workloads continue to run in the cloud?
It looks like the mobile world is doing it better I guess? Lots of AI features are available (just my own experience owning a Samsung phone), but I am not sure if those feature are done locally or also rely on external server.
For example, recently I see in MS Teams a feature to upscale incoming video when the connection is bad, however that does nothing for me; or they also have the AI voice isolation which works decently. What I mean is stuff like that (when it works), like integration into video player to automatically upscale older footage, or the thing MS tried to do with Copilot (Recall or so?, of course disregard all the privacy concern, cool idea IMO)
#technology #hardware
source
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